There were few genuine Negro families. All were herded or separated and sold off in batches and re-herded with little or no regard to family relationships, though these poor, dark-minded slaves did form the most intimate and precious attachments. The slaves’ fervent hope was that massa would marry and have children, so that when he died they would not be sold up, but remain in the family.
Illegitimacy in sexual relationships raged. Almost every planter had besides his own family a dusky brood of colored women. No likely girl escaped the overseers. Poor whites and pinelanders broke into black quarters and ravished where they would. There seemed little squeamishness, and there was little enough effective resistance on the part of black girls. The institution of slavery with its cruelties had brutalized men’s minds. As for the Negro women, one can well understand how little feminine shame would remain when the bare hips were so commonly exposed and flogged.
“Oh, but don’t you know—did nobody ever tell or teach any of you that it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?” asked Fanny Kemble of a slave. The latter seized her vehemently by the wrist and exclaimed:
“Oh, yes, missie, we know—we know all about dat well enough; but we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from the whip; when he make me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? He have strength to make me.”[2]
Probably the slave drivers and other white men obtained some sensual gratification from flogging women. Brutality of this kind is often associated with sexual perversity. The taking of Negro women showed a will toward the animal and was an act of greater depravity than ordinary deflections from the straight and moral way. Not that there was not pride in pale babies and even a readiness on the part of some Negresses to give themselves to white men. As a plantation song said: “Twenty-four black girls can’t make one mulatto baby by themselves.”
By flogging and rape and inhuman callousness did the white South express its reaction to black slavery. There were also burnings, demoniacal tortures, flogging to death, and every imaginable human horror. It may well be asked: How came it about that those who protested so high-mindedly about the introduction of slavery did not use the slaves kindly and humanly when they were forced to have them?
The answer I think lies in the fact that no man is good enough to have complete control over any other man. No man can be trusted. Give your best friend or neighbor power over you, and you’ll be surprised at the use he will make of it. Even wives and children in this respect are not safe in the hands of their husbands and parents if they are understood as possessions. “She belongs to me and I’ll kill her,” Gorky makes a drunken cobbler say. “Ah, no, she does not belong to you; she is a woman, and a woman belongs to God,” says the Russian friend.
There is indeed little more terrifying in human experience than the situation which occurs when one human being is entirely in the power of another, when the prisoner in the dungeon confronts his torturer, when the unprotected girl falls completely into the power of a man, when Shylock has Antonio delivered to him, and so forth.
Cruelty can be awakened in almost any man and woman—it can be developed. A taste for cruelty is like a taste for drink or sexual desire or drugs. It is a lust. It is indeed one of the worst of the lusts. One can forgive or excuse a man the other lusts, but cruelty one cannot—and indeed does not wish to forgive or excuse. Yet how readily does it develop.
The incredible story is told of a young girl lashed by the overseer, threatened with burning. She runs away. It is a gala day on the plantation. The white men hunt her to the swamps with bloodhounds and she is torn to bits before their eyes. They love the spectacle of terror even more than the spectacle of pain. The Negro, of nervous, excitable nature, is marked out by destiny to be a butt for cruelty. It is so to-day, long after emancipation; the Negro, in whom hysterical fear can be awakened, is the most likely to be lynched or chased by the mob or slowly burned for its delight. More terrible than the act of cruelty is the state of mind of those who can look on at it and gloat over it. After all, a lynching is often roughly excusable. A man commits a heinous crime against a woman, scandalizing the community, and the community takes the law into its own hands. The rightness of the action can be argued. But what of the state of heart of a mob of a thousand, watching a Negro burning to death, listening happily to his yells and crying out to “make him die slow”? It is an appalling revelation of the devil in man.